Month: March 2001

OSTERDALEN, Norway–Twenty-three hunters sent by the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management to kill nearly half the wolves in Norway were expected to seek a court order, as ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press on February 21, 2001, to close the Osterdalen Valley to all people not associated with the killing.

On February 2, Groundhog Day, groundhogs across North America declared–by remaining fast asleep in hibernation–that winter would continue. In a much hotter climate, Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe forced Zimbabwean Supreme Court chief judge Anthony Gubbay to resign, warning Gubbay that his personal safety could no longer be guaranteed.

Gubbay and the other Zimbabwean Supreme Court judges outraged Mugabe by finding in December 2000 that his manipulations of election results were unconstitutional. Also illegal, the court found, are expropriations of habitat from private owners to redistribute among so-called “war veterans”–many of them not nearly old enough to have helped in overthrowing the apartheid regime of the former Rhodesia. This followed a November ruling that the ongoing occupations of private wildlife reserves by the “war veterans” are illegal, and an October ruling that Mugabe lacked the authority to pardon the “war veterans” for crimes linked to the occupations.

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2001:King Institute mule #291, renamed Tarun in his final days by People For Animals rescuers Prema Veeraraghavan and Shiranee Pereira, died on January 25, soon after Indian minister of state for empowerment and social justice Maneka Gandhi visited the King Institute to see for herself the conditions which allegedly caused the deaths of more than 70 of the 350 equines used in snake antivenom production during 2000. ANIMAL PEOPLE recounted the plight of the King Institute herd in “Showdown at the Not-Okay Corral,” January/February 2001, and of Tarun in particular: “An elderly mule with long hair and overgrown hooves was down and evidently unable to rise. When ANIMAL PEOPLE pointed this out to the vet, he ordered the stable hand to make the mule rise. The stable hand pulled the mule’s tail. ANIMAL PEOPLE publisher Kim Bartlett asked him to stop, begged the vet to make him stop, and finally stopped the tail-pulling by entering the stall herself.”

VICTORIA, B.C.–British Columbia premier Ujjal Dosanjh on February 8 announced a three-year moratorium on hunting grizzly bears within the province, as sought by Environmental Investigation Agency campaigner Martin Powell in an open letter published in the January/February 2001 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE. In the interim, Dosanjh asked scientists to resolve conflicting estimates which put the B.C. grizzly population at anywhere from 4,000 to 13,000.

SAGINAW, Michigan; SAN FRANCISCO–Parallel fatal attacks in late January moved the Presa Canario, or bull mastiff, to the top of the list of suspected inherently dangerous dog breeds.

Kelly S. Jaime on January 16, 2001 died just inside the door of her apartment in Saginaw, Mich-igan, after an attack by two Presa Canarios allegedly owned by relatives who lived downstairs. Jaime, 22, had married a soldier stationed in Texas three weeks earlier.

HUNTINGDON, U.K.–Admitting concern that bombings and arsons put assets at risk, the Royal Bank of Scotland on January 19, 2001 recalled $33 million in loans to Huntingdon Life Sciences–one of the world’s largest contract testing labs. The vehicles of 10 Huntingdon employees had been bombed since May 2000. Five bombs exploded; flames from two bombings also damaged employees’ houses.

Five other banks and investment firms earlier cancelled investments in Hunting-don. On January 21, however, the Arkansas-based Stephens Group kept Huntingdon solvent with a five-year loan. The group holds 15.7% of the Huntingdon shares. Worth a reported $540 million in 1990, with about 850 staff, Huntingdon fell in estimated market value to just $8 million after BBC-4 reporter Zoe Broughton caught workers abusing animals on video in 1997. Then-PETA investigator Michelle Rokke at almost the same time obtained similar video from inside a New Jersey subsidiary.

Forty thousand hunters from all parts of Mali and the nearby West African nations of Burkina Fasa, Guinea, Niger, and Senecal attended a mid-February festival hosted by Mali president Alpha Oumar Konare in Bamako, Mali. Konare’s motives in bringing the hunters, mostly animists, to largely Islamic Mali, were questioned. “It’s not good, this hunter thing,” one source told Joan Baxter of BBC News. “We fear the president wants to use all the hunters’ powers to extend his mandate.”

WASHINGTON D.C.–Meeting the Invasive Species Challenge, the National Invasive Species Council management plan, was sent to the White House on January 18, 2001. Two years in development, the plan offers strategy through 2003 for a Cabinet-led crusade against
non-native wildlife. But the eight Cabinet members who signed it were already on
their way out of Washington D.C. Just two days from leaving office, former U.S. President
Bill Clinton probably never saw the plan. Whether anyone of rank in the George W. Bush administration will ever pay much attention to it remains unclear.

Ahimsa of Texas tries really hard to table our unique spay/neuter ideas and tools at national humane conventions. We were thrilled to display at both the Spay/USA Waltham conference and the Doing Thing for Animals conference in Tuscon. Because Ahimsa is such a small group, we all work at least one full time job, and we have such a small donation base that we always feel good if we can table at two conferences a year.

Hence, I was excited to see that the Humane Society of the U.S. Animal Expo 2001 was in Dallas. I thought, “I live close enough that we could save on both travel and accommodations.” Imagine my disappointment when I learned that their fee for
non-profit vendor space was almost $500. If HSUS were really working with other nonprofits, wouldn’t it make sense to treat them humanely???

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